Faceless Killers: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

It was a crime of senseless violence. On a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse, an elderly farmer was bludgeoned to death, his wife left to die with a noose around her neck. As if this didn't present enough problems for Ystad police inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman's last word, his only tangible clue, were foreign. If publicized, they could be the match that would inflame Sweden's already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments.

An Event in Autumn

After nearly thirty years in the same job, Inspector Kurt Wallander is tired, restless, and itching to make a change. He is taken with a certain old farmhouse, perfectly situated in a quiet countryside with a charming, overgrown garden. There he finds the skeletal hand of a corpse in a shallow grave. Wallander's investigation takes him deep into the history of the house and the land, until finally the shocking truth about a long-buried secret is brought to light.

The Return of the Dancing Master

Stefan Lindman, a young police officer recently diagnosed with mouth cancer, decides to investigate the murder of his former colleague, but is soon enmeshed in a mystifying case with no witnesses and no apparent motives. Terrified of the disease that could take his life, Lindman becomes more and more reckless as he unearths the chilling links between Molin's death and an underground neo-Nazi network that runs further and deeper than he could ever have imagined.

The Man from Beijing

January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjvallen, nineteen people have been massacred. The only clue is a red ribbon found at the scene. Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: Her grandparents, the Andrns, are among the victims, and Birgitta soon learns that an Andrn family in Nevada has also been murdered. She then discovers the 19th-century diary of an Andrn ancestora gang master on the American transcontinental railwaythat describes brutal treatment of Chinese slave workers.

Don't Look Back

Eve Hardaway, newly single mother of one, is on a trip she’s long dreamed of - a rafting and hiking tour through the jungles and mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Eve wanders off the trail, to a house in the distance with a menacing man in the yard beyond it, throwing machetes at a human-shaped target. Disturbed by the sight, Eve moves quickly and quietly back to her group, taking care to avoid being seen. As she creeps along, she finds a broken digital camera, marked with the name Teresa Hamilton.

The Winter People: A Novel

West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, 19-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary....

The Bullet

Two words: the bullet. That's all it takes to shatter her life. Caroline Cashion is beautiful, intelligent, a professor of French literature. But in a split second, everything she's known is proved to be a lie. A single bullet, gracefully tapered at one end, is found lodged at the base of her skull. Caroline is stunned. It makes no sense: She has never been shot. She has no entry wound, no scar. Then, over the course of one awful evening, she learns the truth.

He's Gone

The Sunday morning starts like any other. But on this particular Sunday morning, she's surprised to see that her husband, Ian, is not home. As the hours pass, Dani fills her day with small things. But still, Ian does not return. And then, like a relentless blackness, the terrible realization hits Dani: He's gone. As the days pass, Dani will plumb the depths of her conscience, turning over and revealing the darkest of her secrets in order to discover the hard truth - about herself, her husband, and their lives together.

Louisiana Longshot: A Miss Fortune Mystery, Book 1

It was a hell of a long shot.... CIA assassin Fortune Redding is about to undertake her most difficult mission ever - in Sinful, Louisiana. With a leak at the CIA and a price placed on her head by one of the world's largest arms dealers, Fortune has to go off-grid, but she never expected to be this far out of her element.

Italian Shoes

With more than 30 million copies of his works published, in 37 languages, award-winning author Henning Mankell may be Sweden's most accomplished novelist. Here he crafts the icy, atmospheric tale of Fredrik Welin, a disgraced surgeon living in exile on a small island. When Fredrik receives a surprise visit from a lover he abandoned decades earlier, he begins the difficult road to redemption.

A Treacherous Paradise

Cold and poverty define Hanna Renström's childhood in remote northern Sweden, and in 1905, at nineteen, she boards a ship for Australia in hope of a better life. But none of her hopes - or fears - prepares her for the life she will lead. After two brief marriages, she finds herself a widow twice over, and the owner of a bordello in Portuguese East Africa, a world where colonialism and white supremacy rule, where she is isolated within society by her profession and her sex, and, among the bordello's black prostitutes, by her color.

The Pocket Wife: A Novel

Dana Catrell is shocked when her neighbor, Celia, is brutally murdered. To Dana's horror, she was the last person to see Celia alive. Suffering from mania, the result of her bipolar disorder, she has troubling holes in her memory, including what happened on the afternoon of Celia's death. Her husband’s odd behavior and the probing of Detective Jack Moss create further complications as she searches for answers.

The Burgess Boys: A Novel

Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan - the Burgess sibling who stayed behind - urgently calls them home.

Real Tigers

The Bond-esque River Cartwight and his group of defunct MI5 spies, headed by the irascible Jackson Lamb, will do anything to get back into the game. When a member of London's Slough House - MI5's stable for disgraced spies, so-called "slow horses" - is kidnapped by a former soldier bent on revenge, the agents must risk treason and breach Regent's Park to steal intel in exchange for their comrade's safety. But the kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg as they are caught in a conspiracy that threatens the future not only of Slough House but of MI5 itself.

Accused: Rosato & DiNunzio, Book 1

New York Times best-selling and Edgar Award-winning author Lisa Scottoline revolutionized crime fiction when she introduced her all-female law firm of Rosato & Associates, thrilling listeners with her twisty, fast-paced plots and capturing their hearts with her cast of strong and relatable female characters. Now Bennie Rosato, Mary DiNunzio, Judy Carrier, and Anne Murphy are back with all cylinders firing in Accused.

Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse, wife, and mother of two, is trying to live a quiet life. The last thing her husband wants is for her to go running off on another dangerous mission to help illegal refugees. But when Nina's estranged friend, Karin, leaves her a key to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, and begs her to take care of its contents, Nina gets suckered into her most dangerous case yet.

The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller

15 thriller masters. 1 masterful thriller! Former war crimes investigator Harold Middleton possesses a previously unknown score by Frederic Chopin. But he is unaware that, within it's handwritten notes, lies a secret that now threatens the lives of thousands of Americans. As he races from Poland to the U.S. to uncover the mystery of the manuscript, Middleton will be accused of murder, pursued by federal agents, and targeted by assassins.

Japantown: A Thriller

In this "sophisticated international thriller" (The New York Times Book Review), an American antiques dealer turned reluctant private eye must use his knowledge of Japanese culture to unravel a major murder in San Francisco - before he and his daughter become targets themselves. San Francisco antiques dealer Jim Brodie receives a call one night from a friend at the SFPD: An entire family has been senselessly gunned down in the Japantown neighborhood of the bustling city.

Baggage

Over the years, terrible things keep happening to Anna Ray on February 17. First, there was the childhood trauma she's never been able to speak about. Then, to her horror, her husband killed himself on that date. A year later and a thousand miles away, Anna tries to find solace in the fresh start of a new job in a new place. She takes comfort in her outspoken cousin Jeannie, the confidant and best friend who's there whenever she needs help.

Kill Her Again: A Thriller

Ever since a close call with death, FBI agent Anna McBride has been having strange visions of a kidnapped little girl... a little girl who is about to be murdered. Is Anna going crazy? When she's assigned to a multiple homicide case, Anna's visions recur with even fiercer frequency, and she can't shake the feeling that what she's seeing is somehow connected to this latest grisly crime....

Forty Thieves

Sid and Ronnie Abel are a first-rate husband-and-wife detective team, both retirees of the LAPD. Ed and Nicole Hoyt are married assassins for hire living in the San Fernando Valley. Except for deadly aim with a handgun, the two couples have little in common - until they are both hired to do damage control on the same murder case. The previous spring, after days of torrential rain, a body was recovered from one of the city's overwhelmed storm sewers.

Fool Me Once

Former special ops pilot Maya, home from the war, sees an unthinkable image captured by her nanny cam while she is at work: her two-year-old daughter playing with Maya's husband, Joe - who had been brutally murdered two weeks earlier. The provocative question at the heart of the mystery: Can you believe everything you see with your own eyes, even when you desperately want to?

Kingdom Come: The Elizabeth Harris Series 1

In Kingdom Come, the first in a new mystery series from Jane Jensen, an ex-NYPD detective seeks escape in Amish country and finds darkness instead. When a beautiful, scantily clad "English" girl is found dead in the barn of a prominent Amish family, Detective Elizabeth Harris knows she's uncovered an evil that could shatter the peace of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Michael Shaw says:"The best Amish murder mystery story since "Witness"

A Tapping at My Door

From the best-selling author of Cry Baby, the beginning of a brilliant and gripping police procedural series set in Liverpool, perfect for fans of Peter James and Mark Billingham. A woman at home in Liverpool is disturbed by a persistent tapping at her back door. She's disturbed to discover the culprit is a raven and tries to shoo it away. Which is when the killer strikes. DS Nathan Cody, still bearing the scars of an undercover mission that went horrifyingly wrong, is put on the case.

Publisher's Summary

In this latest atmospheric thriller, Kurt Wallander and his daughter, Linda, join forces to search for a religious fanatic on a murder spree.

Just graduated from the police academy, Linda Wallander returns to Skane to join the police force, and she already shows all the hallmarks of her father - the maverick approach, the flaring temper. Before she even starts work she becomes embroiled in the case of her childhood friend, Anna, who has inexplicably disappeared.

As the case that her father is working on dovetails with her own, something far more dangerous than either could have imagined begins to emerge. They soon find themselves forced to confront a group of extremists bent on punishing the world's sinners.

This audiobook takes the number one slot on my list of downright peculiar narrative interpretations. Cassandra Campbell does not seem clear on what basic punctuation means to a sentence (pause for commas, full stop for periods). She sounds like she thinks she is reading poetry or something, drawing out syllables in odd ways. The list of irritating choices she made is, for me, a long one, but most egregious is that she read every line of dialogue that Kurt Wallander uttered in a scornful angry tone of voice that was really odd and irritating - even the most benign statements he made were snarled. It was incomprehensible. I've listened to every Wallander - Dick Hill is amazing (he does the first 6 or 7), then the guy who does Return of the Dancing Master was ok but not great. I'd avoid Cassandra Campbell at all costs. I usually get through an audiobook in a few days - this one took me six weeks of pure determination to complete - I could only take listening to her in small doses!

I love Wallander and I like the idea of Wallander and daughter Linda working together. But this one was very tedious, with lots of "and she walked and opened the door, and walked to the chair, and walked back over to the door, and looked out" and on and on. Tedious too was all the awkward antagonism between Linda and her mother as well as her father. A very unbelievable, uncomfortable scene between Linda and mom. And the mystery didn't amount to much; the ending was quite aniclimactic. This one just didn't have the oomph or the sensitivity of other Wallander novels.

What confluence of events came together to make this a terrible, terrible listen?

I agree that with many of the other reviews that the narration of this book was very hard to listen to. Not the least of which was the difference in pronunciations... Not being Swedish, I do not know which narrator used the correct pronunciation, but after having listened to nine previous books, I continually felt (and sometimes did) that I needed to correct her pronunciation. There should have been continuity between the reads...

I also wonder if there was an element to the translation of the book that cause my bad opinion of this book. I have really enjoyed Mankell's previous books, but this one did not even seem to be written by him. The essence and flavor of all of the characters felt wrong. Perhaps, as Mankell was writing/telling the story from a different character's point of view, he changed the feel of them, or it was the translation, or it was the narration, or a combination of all three.

I have to say, if this was the first one of his audiobooks I had purchased, it would have been the last. As it was, the only reason I forced myself to listen to it all is that to not listen would have been a waste of money.

The narrator Cassandra Campbell really ruins the character of Wallander with her voice. She turns him into a completely different person then the one i had know in all the other Mankell books I have read. She is completely insensitive when imitating male voices. It was very upsetting to listen to this misinterpretation.

I have read most of Henning Mankell's books and gave all of them a five star. The problem with this book was the reader. Most unfortunate. She did a fine job with the character, Linda but just couldn't pull off Wallender. I liked Walleneder in former books. And the main reason is because he's human. He deeply cares about people, and particularly his daughter. Although he can be impatient, he's not mean. The reader's depiction of Wallender was that he was mean and unlikable. He loves his daughter and yes, they have a conflicted relationship, but in previoius books, you feel the soft spot and he has for her. The story is good, but if people don't read the other books, they might be quite disappointed in this one and not read more of his books. I can really see how a reader can make or break a book. I stayed with it because the story was good. If I hadn't read so many of his other books, I wouldn't have finished it. She ruined Wallender as I've come to know him.

I hate to give this a "starred" rating since I'm only a third of the way through it, but just want to say that the reader is hard to take. I loved Dick Hill's readings, and just hope nothing has happened to him. First of all, when a main character is inside his head as much as Wallender is, the reader should be a male. Second, a new reader should always listen to the former reader--especially one who has read six books in the series--to continue the pronunciations as expected, and the interpretation of the character we have come to know. I'm sorry that Blackstone didn't follow these rules. It takes away from the experience.

I'm a Mankell fan, feeling let down after this listen. The reader's style was disappointing and detracted from my enjoyment of an entertaining story.

The narrator's Swedish pronounciation is seriously flawed; the attempts at different dialects seemed strained and slightly Irish-sounding to my ears. Wallander's vocal characterization came across as angry and irritable - not in line with the novel's events and inconsistent with the author's representation of his personality in this book and throughout the series.

Comparing the narrative of ALL the Kurt Wallander novels on Audible to this ONE Linda Wallander novel I am finding a disturbing difference in the pronunciation of ongoing characters and towns: Such as Kurt's horse-breeder friend (forgive me I do not know how to spell it as I have not read the book only listened) Sten Wyden, his colleague Rydberg and the his home town of Ystad, just to name a few as I am only on Chapter 8. Now I am assuming, of course, that Dick Hill and the other narrators were given instruction and they are pronouncing these names correctly! I would just expect more uniformity since the author is the same and is writing about the people and places.